A Time for Tears
by Leslie Lady of Light
Summary: Tonks remembers the man who has stolen her heart...and left her behind. Told through a sequence of vignettes and memories. Spoilers from Ootp.


A/N: Another story. This'll be 10 chapters, long.

Title: A Time for Tears

By: Leslie Lady of Light

Rating: R

Genres: Angst, Romance

Spoilers: Prisoner of Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix

Note: There is really no basis for this plotline. It was just something I came up with, when re-reading Ootp for the fifth or so time. Note that it is MUCH darker than the others. Don't expect a happy ending.

**Chapter 1: Prologue**

She thought she had always loved him. All her 22 short years. Granted, that wasn't a very long period of time.

Still, she _had_ known him since she was a year old.

Nymphadora Tonks, Tonks for short, couldn't tell you what it was about him that made her heart burn and quicken, her face flame then pale. Was it perhaps his warm, inviting smile, a flash of amity, of comradeship lighting his handsome face, so dark these days? Or his touchingly protective attitude towards her and the others? Or was it simply his loving and impulsive personality that shone on the dark surroundings in which it was trapped, a refreshing change, an alluring enigma?

Whatever it was, it had made her pick HIM, of all people, to give her love, her loyalty, her (today) black-haired, black-eyed body to, forever.

And Tonks' decisions were always final.

Strange from a girl whose everyday _life_ was never stable, forever changing, always upset by a mission or a tragedy or a clumsy moment…there were a lot of _those_…__

Still, Tonks mused drearily as she hid in her cubicle, trying, briefly, to hide from the scrutinizing eyes of the world, it was a strange fate that had made her, Nymphadora Tonks, avowed ridiculer of love and all things generally sentimental, fall so impractically and completely into love with the one person she could not, respectably, have.

Pushing aside the discouraging thought, Tonks thought back to when she had first met him, when she had joined the Order…she had of course, been shocked…Kingsley Shacklebolt…who had shown her in to the dark, eerie house known as 12 Grimmauld Place…had actually laughed at the contrast between her rattled, almost feeble expression and her daring blue hair (Tonks had been feeling particularly defiant that morning)…Kingsley!

She would have expected a different reaction from _him_, to say the least.

Tonks remembered her ensuing embarrassment and nervousness; would he be angry at her, for not remembering one she had once known so well?; would he perhaps treat her like a child, for that was what she had been when he had known her.

He had laughed it off.

He had always had the gift of laughter…he laughed in all but the most serious situations…always had. It was his way, he had told her once, of dealing with all that was bad, and ugly and cruel in this world. Tonks recalled how drawn she had been, in later days, to that laughter, the sole ray of joy in that dark house.

As time passed, even that had been quenched; he told her there was no longer anything worth laughing for in the world.

Tonks had choked back a sob, silently thanked him with her eyes (a roiling jet-black that day) for gracing her with a gem from that adored mouth and gone away. He so rarely talked to her and her alone that she stored up those memories, to savor later, listening, over and over, to the musical cadences that filled her ears at night.

Tonks sighed and forced her mind back to that day, that first meeting after nearly 14 years. She shivered in a mixture of delight and agony as she remembered how his eyes, so well-known, so beloved, so much darker than before, had went over her, making her blush and tingle.

Tonks had been on the verge of throwing out the daring low-cut robes she had donned with her blue hair that day, but that night, she carefully folded them and hid them, deep in her closet, never to be thrown away.

She might have gotten leers twelve times, but the thirteenth, _that _had been poetry.

Of course, she reminded herself, it was only natural that he should look so; she had been little more than a child when he last swung her in his arms, last Flooed to her house to ruffle her hair and kiss her mother on the cheek. Against her will, Tonks had found herself wondering if he would try the old greeting.

A moment later, anger washed over her, shame flooding her cheeks with bright color. Of course he wouldn't. She was not a child anymore, and whatever childhood infatuations she might have harboured for him, now was not the time for them.

Neither he nor she had the time to be falling in love.

That hadn't stopped her.

Had it stopped him? she wondered, then slapped herself upside the head. What a question to ask, _now_, when it did not matter, _now_, when it was too late, _now_, when all chance was irrevocably lost?

Tonks had always been brutally honest with herself. Had always considered herself, the daughter of one of only two black sheep in the Black family, above sentimental nonsense, above falling in love and such foolish notions.

Now, however, as she looked back on her conduct in the past year, she realized that she had not acted according to character, had, in fact, acted exactly the opposite.

With a sigh of embarrassment, she wondered what he must think of her, throwing herself at him like that, he, a grown man with responsibilities and worries, she, a mere chit of a girl just beginning her life.

She couldn't quite imagine it.

She could, however, imagine her mother's reaction. _Nymphadora Tonks! Didn't I raise you better than that! You're showing your true colors as a Black, acting this way. Didn't Sirius and I prove to you that our path was best, for all its hardships? _

The mention of Sirius would choke her up so badly she would run out of the room, sobbing, leaving Tonks alone with her guilt and her forbidden feelings. Lucky for her, Andromeda Black Tonks had never found out about her daughter's abominable behaviour. Lucky for _her_, more like, Tonks thought ruefully. She would never have heard the end of it if her mother found out she had led one of the two little star children  astray.

Tonks mentally moaned; she had done it again, lapsed into memory, forgotten the present.

Of course he could not think badly of her _now_, no matter how he had thought of her before.

He was dead now.

Or worse than dead.

Tonks gave a dry sob at the thought of his magnificent dark blue-black eyes, closed forever. She had never been able to get enough of his eyes – silvery blue, with a hint of black in their depths.

She shuddered as the topic of eyes brought to mind another pair of well-known ones, these, hated.

_She _had had his eyes, the same eyes, but _hers_ were cold and heartless, with not a particle of the mirth, happiness and compassion that his had. _She_ had had his eyes, and not just his eyes either.

_She_, Tonks remembered furiously, had had his heart.

The heart that Tonks so desperately wanted, the heart that Tonks could never have.

No, he could not give her his heart.

Not when it was in another's keeping.

Not when it was in _her _keeping.

Tonks growled under her breath and her hands clenched into fists as she imagined his heart in _her _hands, torn, bleeding, cruelly held.

Because, of course, _she _had not had a heart of her own.

Tonks cursed her silently and plunged deeper into memories.

Because that was all she had left.

Memories.

There was no longer any going back, any saying or not saying this or that. She could no longer remedy her actions or change her past, because Sirius Black had disappeared, irrevocably, behind the veil, taking her heart with him…


End file.
